I tried living the life of a philosopher (or thinker) the last three days, and I’m spending the next three days of this week living like a researcher.

Today, I started work on my Physics EE. I’m doing something on tennis racquet strings and the elasticity of the string bed. I went through so much trouble trying to complete the setup of my experiment. The most annoying thing I had to consider was making sure string tension was kept constant when I tried to string my model. Oh yes, not to forget, I spent the whole morning trying to construct a suitable model. Back to string tension.. I tried using a pulley system by lowering a mass down the building from the window of the Physics lab on the 2nd floor. Some people who walked from the canteen to the classroom block were observant enough to notice a mass dangling from above. At one point, the string holding the pulley from the window snapped and I was in a state of shock. Thankfully, the mass didn’t crash onto the ground or worse still, on an unfortunate person’s head.

After spending 6 hours working in the lab, I only managed to generate one preliminary set of data, and I’m thinking of changing my model and setup again tomorrow. I’ll have 8 hours to do that.

After CCA, I was talking to someone who was doing Econs EE and she already completed 1800 words (while people like me still haven’t settled their setup). What’s more, she said the Econs people spent the day slacking, eating Macs and plying guitar hero. Gah… Science is all about perseverance. But I must say, I did enjoy the process of working around my problems and scouring the physics labs for any tools and material I could possibly use.

Looks like the lab is going to be my second home for the next few weeks..